Feedburner not disallowing use of deleted feeds to third parties? |
Loading ...We’ve used the service Feedburner somewhat sparingly across a few of our blogs. Overall, I’ve been happy with the service. I resisted the idea of using them for the main feeds here simply because I didn’t like the idea of offloading the primary feed to a third party. Yes, it can be done silently in the background with some backend redirection and Feedburner is good about graceful exit plans (see: Feedburner won’t burn you on the way out), but most folks won’t bother. In fact, some folks will delete a feed and create a new one without concern for what happens to the old feed.
Case in point, Guy Kawasaki, see performancing:
I was duped into unsubscribing from Guy Kawasaki’s blog. It wasn’t untill I got to my friend Graywolfs post that I even realized I’d been had. This is a problem Feedburner need to sort out immediately
What can happen apparently is that the deleted feed can be recreated by anybody, thus allowing a third party to hijack the feed with a built-in readership. While you’re trying to convince subscribers from the old feed to join the new one, your more passive readers will be reading somebody else, thinking it’s still you.
Suggested solutions
Don’t allow recreation of an old feed name by a different user. Forever — or at least say 1 year — put a block in the database to any other user and allow reclaim by the existing user if they change the name without thinking about the consequences.
There are plenty of unique names out there so I don’t see why Feedburner couldn’t provide this sort of protection. Is it in the plans? And no, it shouldn’t be for their Pro (paid) clients only. Seems like overall Feedburner has been pretty good about doing the right thing for users so my suspicion is that they will act quickly on this issue and make the appropriate changes.
If you currently use Feedburner and are concerned about this issue, you might want to drop them a line and/or blog about it. You know, squeaky wheels, grease.
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Hey there … I have a few thoughts from the FeedBurner perspective here: http://www.burningdoor.com/eric/archives/001892.html . If we hear from publishers that our 30-day “waiting period” is too short, we’ll extend it. As it is, we will extend that redirect period for any particular feed if a publisher requests it.
Thanks!
Eric Lunt
CTO, FeedBurner
Comment by Eric Lunt — June 30, 2006 @ 10:07 am PST
Thanks Eric for the fast response. My vote is minimum 1 year for the deleted name, so please put that in the hat. It’s just a unique string in the database, it’s not a big deal on your end to fix this and if it is, it shouldn’t be. 30 days is much, much too short and it leaves you guys open to taking a PR hit for aiding hijackers (unintentionally). Luckily in this case, it wasn’t somebody out to do something malicious, just make a point (like that guy did with the cancel AOL call).
Comment by TDavid — June 30, 2006 @ 10:26 am PST